The message is the medium

MIT Technology Review Confusing A Company With Bitcoin

“The company’s travails neatly demonstrate two problems with Bitcoin as a currency and payment mechanism.

First, no one much wants to pay with Bitcoin and there’s not currently good reason to think that will change.” – URL

So why is the number of transactions rising steadily? Tom Simonite, you need to be able to differentiate between the VC-backed company Bitpay and the open-source information network Bitcoin. The former has nervous venture capitalists breathing down their necks, the latter is an amazing and stable network that has been running confidently since January 2009. Bitcoin will not go mainstream overnight, however much any single VC hopes for it.

Reading further in this uninformed text:

Researcher Nicholas Weaver at the International Computer Science Institute has called that Bitcoin’s “fatal flaw. ”Conventional electronic transactions such as credit card charges and bank transfers can all be undone if fraud is detected.

On the contrary, this (the irreversibility) is one of Bitcoin’s biggest strengths. Thanks to the fact that bitcoins are like cash – you send them over the Internet – we can avoid giving away our credit card numbers, our ID, our address and personal information to merchants that get hacked, and hacked, and hacked and hacked again all the time (and that was just 4 examples from the news feeds from the last 24 hours).